


Five First Kisses That May (Or May Not) Have Saved Angel’s Life

by thecarlysutra



Category: Angel: the Series, Bones (TV), Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-07-27
Updated: 2007-07-27
Packaged: 2017-10-12 17:21:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,982
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/127196
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thecarlysutra/pseuds/thecarlysutra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Love's first kiss.  Awaken.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five First Kisses That May (Or May Not) Have Saved Angel’s Life

  
Angel had spent his life working out new ways to be larger than it. This is the kind of thing that gets you arrested fairly often.

He had never had the pleasure, however, of being arrested by the FBI. The Tsarist Secret Police once, but never the FBI. It was almost exciting, like a milestone he could check off his life's list.

Angel's feelings toward law enforcement personnel were not of contempt, but more a kind of pitying humor. In almost every instance, real life police were more like Keystone Cops than capable, steel-jawed noir heroes.

Special Agent Seeley Booth did not raise his estimations much. Growling and parading like a show cock in a mid-priced suit.

Angel liked the belt buckle, though.

"When did you meet the girl?" Booth asked. Angel continued smiling and pulled experimentally at his handcuffs.

"You think this is funny? We caught you red-handed – literally – at the scene of a homicide. You're gonna do a _lot_ of time. I'm trying to help you out, here. But I need something from you."

Angel decided that he definitely didn't have enough leverage to break the cuffs or the chair he was tied to. Maybe flip the chair over?

"You have to talk to me. Tell me what happened, and I can get you a deal."

No, what good would that do? Then he'd just be on the floor . . . maybe he could use the chair as a weapon?

Booth pulled the chair opposite Angel from where it was tucked beneath the table. He slid it, in one surprisingly graceful movement, so that it was nearly touching the chair Angel was handcuffed to.

"It was an accident, right?" Booth said, sliding into the chair backwards, his chest flush against the chair's back, his legs spread in the confident, casual pose of the alpha male. "You met the girl somewhere, you were having a good time . . . and then she made you angry."

That was stupid, too. Dammit. Time for a new plan.

"I was angry enough to mess up a pretty face like that?" Angel asked. "Not to mention the neck trauma . . ."

Booth frowned. His hands fretted on the back of the chair.

"You know a lot about what happened for someone who wasn't involved. Unless that was a confession."

"I didn't do it," Angel said.

"Forgive me if I don't believe you," Booth said, and then he met Angel's eyes, and the corner of his mouth turned up into something not unlike a smirk.

It was the smirk that did it. There was a single, high, metallic note as the legs of both men's chairs collided, and then silence but for the quickening of Booth's heartbeat and the catch in his breath. The agent tasted like coffee and cordite and stale sex.

"What the hell—" All the pasted on bravado and the real predator competence had bled from his voice. All that remained was a small, thin thing with undernotes of want and panic.

"I promise I'll tell you everything after," Angel said. He was almost certain he could get the cuff keys off the guy in a couple hours of close contact. And if he couldn't, he'd gotten out of the Tower of London; an FBI interrogation room should be a piece of cake. Something would come to him; he had plenty of time to think it over.

"I—" Booth said, and then Angel kissed him again. It was like turning somebody; Angel felt the man surrender, and then he felt the agent's strong, rough hands on him. Everywhere.

Angel had, through pride and general machismo, very seldom been tied up during sex.

But he'd let it slide this time.

***

Handsome man saved her. It was like a fairytale, one rehearsed hundreds of times in her mind.

The real thing was exponentially better than the fantasy, and Fred didn't care if her hero was a little bit of monster. Everybody has problems.

She did not consider that she had, in her own way, rescued him. She just sat in her cave, her hand still sticky with blood, and watched as the man fell into a fitful sleep. Once he'd mostly stopped twitching, she inched closer, leaving little red footsteps on the stone as she went. Fred watched the man's still, beautiful face—now free of any demony bits—and wondered what she'd finally done to make her dreams come true, which formulas had conjured her knight from the ether.

And if she could do it again.

The man shuddered, moaning, and Fred rested her hand on his quaking shoulder. He stilled beneath her touch but for a few muted aftershocks, and his cry died in his throat.

"It's okay," Fred whispered.

The man twitched again in response, the muscles of his face twisting into a flinch. Fred didn't know a formula to fix this. Without thinking, rare for her, she bent and pressed her lips gently to the man's forehead. He stilled completely, his face and body relaxing.

Maybe she could do it again.

***

Cordelia had always made him feel a little stupid.

Okay, in the early days, when she was just in the periphery of Buffy's spotlight, Angel had been pretty sure that Queen C was the stupid one. The girl was vapid and self-centered, and he cared so much about her that it was lucky he'd recognized her at Tina's friend's party.

But, from the moment she'd attached herself to his ship like a money-hungry barnacle, he had realized that Cordelia Chase was more than met the eye. The girl had played him into giving her a job, and she routinely made light work of conning him into doing other things for her.

She was no dummy.

Then there was the routine skewering of Angel's intellect and pop culture knowledge. And how he was never able to keep up with her winding trains of thought aptly enough for her approval. And then how she blossomed into an intelligent, kind, beautiful woman and it had taken him way too long too notice.

But she had never made him feel so stupid as he did now. She was just leaving him alone for no reason, and now her lips were locked on his, her arms wrapped around him, her scent and taste making him dizzy.

He really should have thought of that.

***

Angel hadn't smoked pot since the eighties – you really needed pot to get you _through_ the eighties, even after surviving the fashion choices he had – but where you got it? That was the same. Dark alleys, the better clubs, laidback musicians.

Oz spoke as he exhaled a cloud of thick, herby smoke; Angel had never heard him speak so fast before. The thought struck him as funny, but not funny enough to laugh, not even in this haze.

"Youhavereallygoodtaste," was what he said.

Angel didn't quite smile. "You have really good connections."

Oz's cheeks hollowed as he took another hit, and Angel became aware of the delicate architecture of the boy's bone work: his thin, slanting cheekbones; his small, nimble-fingered hands.

Angel felt a sudden flush, and a strong craving hit him right in the chest. He needed to forget about that kind of thing; he'd spent countless hours and, tonight, a week's worth of blood money toward forgetting. He had a down payment on forgetting, and possibly a security deposit and first and last month's rent.

"Yeah, that's true," Oz said, passing the warm pipe to Angel. Their fingers brushed, and Angel looked away.

"What I don't get, though," Oz continued. Angel was glad he didn't need to breathe; it only made a massive hit easier, and he needed it needed it needed it. "Is how you can do this."

Angel knew what the boy was talking about, but he wasn't really expecting the question, and he exhaled sooner than he'd wanted, surprise taking his false breath. For a moment, the smoke obscured Oz's face, passing an unnatural shadow across him.

"I don't need to breathe, but I can pretend."

Oz seemed mollified by this answer. "Cool."

"A lot of things are like that," Angel said. He wasn't sure whether he was talking to Oz anymore or not.

"Yeah, I get that."

Oz took the pipe back. This time, his fingers tangled around Angel's, and Angel – looking up to meet the boy's eyes – realized it was not a mistake.

Oz set the pipe down. "She really loves you."

"Yeah."

"I wish I had your self-restraint. I mean . . . new levels of Zen. Like . . . lama levels."

"I don't feel like a lama. I don't feel patient. I don't feel virtuous—"

Angel was too busy thinking of Buffy and his own sin to notice Oz closing the distance between them. It took him a moment to realize what was happening, but his vampire senses meant that tasting Oz was a bigger priority than tasting the sour, smoky savor coating the boy's tongue, his teeth. One minute they were talking, and Angel's world was haze, and then Oz's taste burst vividly to the forefront of his senses, his mind, and everything else fell away.

***

Buffy smelled like earth.

Angel used to dream about the way she smelled. All kinds of dreams: wet dreams; John Hughes perfect crush dreams; dark, violent, vivid dreams that he craved so much they couldn't count as nightmares.

That her scent had changed disturbed him profoundly, although he remembered that. He'd lived that. The smell of your grave clinging to you for weeks after you'd risen, no matter how often or how hard you scrubbed.

Angel had read, years ago, when organic farming started getting popular, that the earth had a memory. At the time, he'd shrugged it off as stupid hippie crap, because he was thinking about cleaving the earth's dark, captive womb season after season to give birth to potatoes and tiny sweet carrots, and about how it never stopped doing that. The soil didn't stop giving: there were always potatoes and there were always carrots, season after season.

Then Buffy's smell hit him and he understood things differently. He was never a superstitious man, but now he believed with utter certainty that, if he revisited the lonely cemetery an ocean away, if he stood on the spot that probably still bore his headstone, the earth would open up for him. Wanting.

Angel wanted to talk, to tell her how he'd missed her and how he loved her and how everything was going to be okay. But he could barely greet Buffy before she was against him, her birdbone hands a vice around his wrist; a hungry, crawling spider inside his clothes. Her body surged against his, but before he could think of how much he wanted her, he counted her ribs through her shirt, through his shirt. Before he could think of how much he wanted her, he thought of the bright-eyed girl with the baby fat cheeks who used to blush and grin when he looked her way.

Angel stopped moving, stopped reacting to her, but Buffy kept on, scaling him like the fence out of a crime scene. Her touch hurt, but not as much as the keen coming from behind her breastbone.

There was another girl once, another special, chosen girl, and he took her in his arms as she fell to the rain slick ground. It wasn't that long ago, but now everything felt as though it could be separated from this moment by every one of his years.

Never before had Buffy made him feel old.

Her mouth pressed to his, more a bite than a kiss. Angel didn't want to be kissed: he wanted to hold her until she reached the place where she broke enough to be fixed again, and to tell her it was all right.

Buffy tasted like ashes, and for the first time since he traded his life for a dead girl's, Angel cried.  



End file.
